NPS extends NHA comment period to Feb. 19

The National Park Service (NPS) recently announced the extension of a deadline for those wishing to comment on a recent draft study concerning the proposed Southern Campaign of the Revolution National Heritage Area (NHA).

Supporters of the concept -- which would tie together Revolutionary War sites in two dozen South Carolina counties, including Kershaw County, and a number of sites in North Carolina -- expressed disappointment with the draft study during two Jan. 10 public meetings in Camden. In the draft, the NPS concluded that the proposed NHA did not meet four of 10 required criteria. All 10 criteria have to be met in order for the NPS to recommend to Congress that the NHA be created.

This is not the first time the NPS has extended the comment deadline. Originally, the deadline would have been set for mid-December, 30 days after the draft had been made public. The NPS pushed the deadline to Jan. 20 to accommodate holiday schedules. The NPS’s new deadline is Feb. 19.

During the Jan. 10 meetings, NPS officials noted that one of the unmet criteria -- public approval of a final study area map -- could not be met because the map had just been finalized. The final map is now available on the NPS’s website as part of the draft study.

Go to the project's home page, then click on “Open for Comment” on the left hand side of the page. On the resulting page, click “Draft Southern Campaign of the Revolution National Heritage Area Suitability/Feasibility Study Nov. 2011.” On the next page, click “SOCA Suitability/Feasibility Study - Start and Chapters” in the middle of the page. This is a very large (11.2 MB) portable document format (PDF) file and may take some time to download. Once it does, however, go to page 13 to see the NPS’s final map of the proposed NHA. Maps showing a three-phase approach to creating the NHA are available on pages 53, 54 and 55 of the PDF.

A smaller, but still large (7 MB) PDF of the study’s appendix is also available for review.

To comment on the study, click the “Comment on Document” button near the middle of the Web page and fill out the form on the resulting page.